About
Dakota Trasser is a 30-year-old itinerant Teacher of the Visually Impaired at the Montgomery County Educational Service Center in Dayton, Ohio. He is in his sixth year, serving blind, low-vision, and CVI students Pre-K through 12 across nearly ten school districts. He drove twenty-five thousand miles last year doing it.
Ohio has between sixty and seventy TVIs, statewide. Dakota's Substack, VI In Mind, has 271 subscribers. It is one of the only public mentorship voices in the specialty.
He entered the field in memory of his late grandfather Jerry, who went blind from diabetic retinopathy. He trained at Ohio State on the Primary Education with Visual Impairment licensure pilot, an associate's at the University of Cincinnati before that. He married in 2025 and enrolled in a Master's program the same year, which is when the newsletter paused; it relaunched on 28 October 2025.
The voice is direct: candid about burnout, candid about his own OCD, candid that he wishes he weren't called 'the expert.' He is not trying to build an audience. He is trying to convince the next generation that the job is survivable if you redesign it.
Highlights
- Subscribers
- 271 on Substack
- Caseload
- ~10 school districts · 25,000+ miles/year
- Field size
- 60-70 TVIs in all of Ohio
- In field since
- 2020 (6th year)
- TPT store
- VI In Mind · 10 listings
Deeper Dive
The headline argument is NEXT GEN TVI (January 2026), a five-point structural reform agenda for the pipeline: caseload-versus-workload reform, formal apprenticeship, ending the martyr model, career ladders without leaving the classroom, and honest recruiting. Around it sit the craft posts — 'The 25,000 Mile Teacher,' 'Rookie Mistakes' — and the mental-health disclosures, including 'OCD, Anxiety, and the Itinerant Teacher,' which closes with five coping strategies that read like operating instructions for a job the system underprovisions.
A second lane educates sighted educators and parents. CVI Awareness Month, the Mad About Acuity series on legal blindness, 'Dim The Lights' on holiday light sensitivity, 'Diving into Alt Text,' and 'Low-Vision Adapted Games.' A third lane covers civic-life accessibility — 'Voting Blind,' 'Don't Call It a Stick!' on cane terminology, 'Debunked: Helen Keller is REAL!,' 'Ableist Attitudes.'
The work also has a product side. His Teachers Pay Teachers store, also called VI In Mind, sells printable high-contrast number and letter cards, CVI-adapted shape and letter bundles, Grade 2 SIM braille flashcards for dual-readers with degenerative eye conditions, and a free Holiday Hunt scanning activity. Hand Under Hand, his forthcoming Substack podcast, takes its name from the deafblind tactile-communication technique.
In Their Words
“There are ONLY 60-70 TVIs in the entire state of Ohio.”
“This won't be a glossy newsletter with buzzwords and filler. It's a grassroots, human, and (hopefully) helpful space — grounded in the real work we do every day.”